16 Leaders The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
2 of political control over judges. Three main proposals are under
discussion: a review of judicial review; putting the judges back
in the House of Lords; and reintroducing some sort of political
control over judicial appointments.
Sinister headlines aside (though they are not entirely beside
the point, since the author of the Mail’s is now Mr Johnson’s offi-
cial spokesman), claims of a backlash against the judiciary are
ill-founded. A recent survey found that, whereas 81% of Britons
trust judges, just 14% trust politicians. Nor is judicial overreach
to blame for most of the decisions that are said to outrage the
public. The extension of the purview of law into previously per-
sonal areas of life and the rise of judicial review are the result of
new legislation, and are thus the politicians’ fault.
If the government thinks that the state intrudes too far into
people’s lives, then it could legislate to that effect, thereby also
curtailing judicial review. And if it reckons the hradoes not
have public support, then, although this newspaper would re-
gret it, it could repeal the act.For the executive to curb the judiciary directly would neither
achieve those ends nor serve the British people. An independent
judiciary is an essential check on the tendency of majorities to
mistreat minorities and of executives towards authoritarianism.
Enthusiasm for undermining that independence, as in Poland
and Hungary, is a good indicator of a government’s authoritarian
instincts. The Supreme Court should remain physically separate
from the House of Lords, for that is an expression of its indepen-
dence. Judicial appointments should also be kept safely beyond
the reach of politicians. Where that is not so, partisan rows over
appointments undermine faith in the courts. The former attor-
ney-general, Geoffrey Cox, said that the government did not in-
tend to go down the American route; it is to be hoped that Ms
Braverman takes a similar view.
Post-Brexit, the government is in a radical mood. That is a
good thing. It should be open to ideas about how Britain might
do things better. Limiting the power and independence of judges
is not among them. 7J
eff bezos, the boss of Amazon and the world’s richest man,
has long had a reputation as a peculiarly frugal plutocrat. A
quarter of a century after Amazon was founded, the firm, now
worth over a trillion dollars, still does not pay dividends to its
shareholders. Lately, though, his personal purse-strings have
loosened. Earlier this month Mr Bezos paid $165m for a mansion
in Beverly Hills. On February 18th he announced that he would be
spending $10bn (around 8% of his fortune) setting up the Bezos
Earth Fund. Climate change, he said, was the biggest threat fac-
ing humanity, and the fund’s resources would be available to any
effort that offered a “real possibility to help preserve and protect
the natural world”.
Mr Bezos has long been gripped by an environmentalist
dream—albeit an unusual one. In the 1970s Ge-
rard O’Neill, a Princeton physicist, advocated
moving industry into orbit so that Earth’s envi-
ronment could be repaired and preserved. Mr
Bezos subscribes to this vision. He has invested
billions of dollars in a rocketry firm, Blue Origin,
devoted to the industrialisation of space. Now
he is turning to the preservation of the Earth.
In the context of climate change, $10bn is
both a lot and a little. The Earth Fund will have to hand out at
least $500m a year to avoid tax penalties, and Mr Bezos could add
to the pot. The next-biggest climate donor, the Hewlett Founda-
tion, disburses around $120m a year in the area. But the scale of
the problem dwarfs even Mr Bezos’s vast resources. The cost of
meeting the Paris agreement, which aims to prevent the planet
warming by more than 2°C, compared with pre-industrial levels,
has been estimated at 2.5% of the world’s $86trn gdpevery year.
As a technically minded space cadet, though, Mr Bezos surely
knows his Archimedes. Moving the Earth is not a matter of brute
force, but of finding the right lever. There are, broadly, two types
of leverage open to him. One is political: turn the tide of opinion
and politics in America, thereby adding a superpower’s force tohis efforts. The other is technological; take things that the mar-
ket is ignoring and build them up to the point where, in the right
political environment, they can make money for other people.
Then watch those other people do just that.
The political route is risky. Existing philanthropies have
spent a great deal of money trying to shift the debate in America,
to little avail. It is also, potentially, over-subscribed. Mike
Bloomberg—another climate-conscious billionaire—is spend-
ing vast sums to try to oust Donald Trump from the White House.
In technology, progress will come from putting large
amounts in well-chosen areas outside the mainstream. There is
little point in ploughing money into solar and wind power, or
electric vehicles. Better to focus on taking the risk out of things
which the world needs but markets will not yet
invest in. Building full-scale pilot plants for
emissions-free steel-smelting and concrete-
making would be helpful. So, too, would creat-
ing farms that maximise both crop yields and
carbon storage, becoming sinks for greenhouse
gases instead of sources.
A smaller chunk of the fund could be re-
served for technologies much further from ac-
ceptance. One such is solar geoengineering—cooling the Earth
by reflecting away some incoming sunlight. In most discussion
of climate action this approach, widely seen as unpalatable and
dangerous, is sidelined. Although by no means a silver bullet, or
even necessarily a desirable strategy, assessing how it might be
undertaken in a responsible way deserves more attention. Fund-
ing is feeble at present—perhaps $20m a year worldwide. Mr Be-
zos could double that at the stroke of a pen.
His goal of creating a new civilisation in the heavens to save
Earth remains far-fetched and, to many, unattractive. But he
does not need to achieve that to speed up the fight against cli-
mate change. He just needs to spend copiously, but wisely. And
that is how he got rich in the first place. 7The great Bezos giveaway
The richest man in the world has promised $10bn to fight climate change. How should he spend it?Climate philanthropyEnergy-related CO2 emissions
Global share by sector, 2015, %Other industryOtherConstruction
industryBuildings Transport28 11 22 30 9